


Three Car Scenes

by rainer76



Category: Fringe
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-13
Updated: 2011-09-13
Packaged: 2017-10-23 17:09:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/252766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainer76/pseuds/rainer76





	Three Car Scenes

1/. The Ford - 2011.

 _(I hate to dance, I’d take you though. Really, why? I don’t know, seems like it would be fun – Peter and Olivia) ___

“You are kidding me.”

Olivia wakes up languid. Her toes are pushed into the foot-well; her chair reclined at an angle. She doesn’t remember falling asleep. The sky out the window is mottled blue and grey, inside nothing but warmth. She wakes up restful. The memory of family drives, of falling asleep in the backseat with her head on Rachel’s shoulder, of how her father would carry her into the house as she feigned sleep, indolent in his arms, drifts away as awareness kicks in. They’re on a stretch of highway, fields to either side, the sound of the windscreen wipers the only melody in the car. “What is it?” Olivia identifies the low thump (a rear flat tire), before Peter answers, and twists her neck around to check the traffic.

The Ford slows down, petering out to a stop on the gravel as Peter brakes gently. The road behind them is empty, there’s nothing but asphalt stretching into the future. The rain dotting the windows is light, a spring shower framed by sunshine and overhanging cloud. Olivia stares at the fields of grass, the scattered livestock clumped under solitary trees, and breathes out. The folder on her knees begins to tip. Olivia catches it, stares at Allister McCourt’s image one final time before closing the file. “You any good at changing tires?” she asks innocently.

Peter throws her a look, mouth turned down. “Mechanical genius, yes?”

Olivia quirks an eyebrow. “Of course.” Peter scoffs, not ready to drop the act of indignity, and kisses her lightly on the side of the cheek. Olivia turns her head at the last moment, lets his mouth skirt the edges of her own. He pulls away reluctantly and steps out into the light rain.

McCourt should have been a run-of-the-mill serial killer, but he was gifted with a silver tongue. He left behind a daisy-chain pattern of little girls, four of them, before Fringe Division was called in. The father of the last victim said he opened the door, escorted McCourt to his daughter’s bedroom, and pulled the blankets back. The video footage of his interview was grainy, but Olivia remembers the receding hairline, the dumb agony in his voice as he described lifting his child into her killer’s arm. _I actually waved them goodbye as the car drove away._

Savannah police department found her body three days later - Christy Marie, aged nine, raped, stabbed once in the external iliac artery - she bled out in less than a minute, a dark stain of blood between her legs. Terrence Marie, forty-one, committed suicide three hours after his interview was conducted by the SPD.

Olivia slept a total of five hours in seven days, uneasy, until Allister McCourt slumped to the ground with a third eye.

She came away from the case brittle as an October wind, all of her sharp edges buffeted. She went into the case certain she needed to go alone, except Peter became her shadow, malleable over the drifting landscape of her emotions - _what makes you think Allister’s a cortexiphan kid? _\- the easiest solution, Olivia thought, except he _wasn’t _and Olivia still doesn’t have an explanation for how or why Allister did the things he did. They were supposed to fly home after the case concluded but Peter cancelled the airline tickets, took a fleet car and chose the back roads of America. He’s been driving her steadily toward home.____

Olivia puts the folder aside, finally ready to let it go, and stretches, shoulders planted into the backrest. Behind her the trunk’s pulled open abruptly, letting in a flood of cold air. She listens as Peter searches for the jack, tire lever, and the spare before slamming the door. Olivia opens her own and steps onto the road. The smell of wet grass hits her, skin pebbling from the temperature shift. Olivia turns her face toward the rain.

She’s slept more soundly in the passenger seat of the Ford than she has in her own home. Her mobile remains stubbornly silent against the normal onslaught of phone calls. Her one attempt at reaching Broyles ended with a gruff ‘take your time, Dunham’, and asking Peter about Walter only ended with a shrug, an elaborate ‘a day or two won’t kill him, it’ll be good for his burgeoning independence’. When Olivia asked about Astrid’s mental health Peter’s mouth tipped into a smile. Since then it’s been driving, hearty food, and sleepy stops across isolated inlets where Peter curls close to her spine, his hand set against the dip of her throat, where the fingers of her collarbone stretch yearningly toward one another. Warm. His presence beside her is always warm. Walter told her once Peter’s temperature ran a little hotter than most, the perfect butt for a joke or bragging rights, except the scientist seemed disquieted when he made the admission. Olivia watches as Peter jacks the car up, his movements quick, efficient, hair damp with the rain, and thinks he’s thawing out all the cold islands of her isolation.

Olivia squats beside him on the road, pushes aside the wet strands of her hair. “First love?”

“Samantha Davis,” Peter answers, not missing a beat. He glances up, his smile a flash of white teeth. “You?”

“Travis Daniels,” Olivia reminisces. There’s oil on Peter’s knuckles, the car slants at an angle and she watches as he wrestles the hub off to expose the wheel lugs. “I was eighteen, he was my college professor.” Peter almost drops the lever on his toes, a cross tool with differing socket wrenches on each end, Olivia’s smile widens. “You’re practically a boy-toy in comparison.”

She likes the game, how it segues into gentle teasing, into snippets of history that remain largely unwritten. Her first love, a college professor, was a cliché, maybe. Except for a girl who lived her life trying to blend in, trying to remain _unseen _, there was a thrill to her moments of rebellion. Daniels, and later John Scott, were part of a pattern Olivia doesn’t examine closely, except at some point, she decided to colour outside the lines of Walter and Bell’s conditioning. Olivia doesn’t regret any of the men she loved – even those who were secreted away - supposedly off-limits because they were teachers or partners, people who would have drawn attention to Olivia’s actions.__

Peter’s watching her. The socket’s fitted against the wheel nut, his shirt see-through damp with the rain.

It’s not a cold shower, Olivia’s come to realise, the sun remains out, steam rises from the asphalt in ephemeral trails. She sets her fingers against his jaw-line. Peter has a hundred smiles, most of them a smoke-screen. Peter smiles when he’s angry or upset, when he’s indulgent, but the most honest ones are found in his eyes, well guarded against the outside world. He tilts into her touch. “And Sam?” she prompts.

“Flat-chested as teenage boy,” Peter grins. “But a gymnast, and damn, she was flexible.”

Olivia snorts with laughter. Bishop returns his attention to the socket. Olivia watches, bemused, as the nut refuses to move. There’s an interesting contortion of expressions on Peter’s face before he breaks off and rubs his hands against wet denim. “Put your back into it,” Olivia teases mildly.

Peter cuffs her over the ear lightly and invites. “Heave-ho, miss.” She takes the other side of the cross bar, pushes upward as Peter levers down, and breaks into a series of curses when the lever skitters loose from the wheel nut and they both end up raking their knuckles against the gravel. The nut hasn’t budged an inch.

“This is kind of embarrassing,” Peter declares.

Olivia laughs, completely wet on a deserted highway with Gene’s brethren for distant company. “If it makes you feel better, the car’s brand new. The components were fitted by machine, not by hand.”

Peter stares at the wheel mutinously then tries it again.

Olivia opens the car door and flips her phone open, dials roadside assistance, and whispers as an aside. “Don’t give yourself an aneurism. Walter will never forgive me.” Peter’s laughter is choked with physical strain; she hears the lever drop to the ground with a clatter as he straightens. Olivia relates their co-ordinates to the call-centre then drops her phone into the clean ashtray when she’s done. She closes the door again. Peter’s reclined against the side of the vehicle as Olivia reports. “ETA, and I quote, ‘an hour, maybe two.’”

“Come here.”

She drifts toward him. Peter’s arm circles her back, his leg pushing between her thighs. Olivia settles against him. There’s a beat, and then he moves, hip guiding her to quarter turn, his leg sliding forward. Startled, Olivia moves with him, instinctive, fluid as water. His hand braces against her spine, his right arm locks into guard. His face remains close, nothing but a hint of playfulness and the shifting tide of his body.

“Are you dancing with me?” Olivia says, incredulous.

“It’s part of Peter Bishop bucket list,” he concurs and dips her. “One dance with Olivia Dunham…the rain was optional.”

Olivia’s hand tightens on his forearm; the palm on the centre of her spine holding her steady against any fall. “I thought you needed to be _dying _to have a bucket list.”__

Peter grins. “We’re _all _dying. Why be complacent about it?” and touches his finger to her nose. Oil, Olivia remembers belatedly, and almost goes cross-eyed against the dark stain he leaves behind. He kisses her sweetly, until the ‘dance’ becomes nothing more than a gentle sway, his head tucked into her neck, the linen of his shirt clutched tightly between her fingertips. It’s a stolen moment, and then she thinks it’s just Peter, taking the opportunities as they come. She hid her affair with John - their relationship a series of random hotels, illicit meetings, and the thrum of the ‘forbidden’ making every encounter knife sharp.__

Four years later, on an abandoned road, with nothing but the open skies, a scattering of cows to bear witness to their slow dance, Olivia thinks, I love you, and then more intrinsically, _I don’t want to keep you hidden _.__

 

2/. 1990 – The Bishop family vehicle.

 _(You used to do this to me when I was a kid. You’d strap me down to car batteries and shock me – Peter Bishop). ___

Peter’s pretty sure this is the precursor to a monumental divorce.

Samantha’s parents separated a year ago, divvied up personal belongings, the kids, sold the house, even took out joint custody of the family dog, named Bark, and Peter doesn’t remember _them _fighting this much in the months beforehand. His mother hurls a spanner against the wall, inches from Walter’s head, hard enough to embed in the plaster. “You do it again, Walter, and I am taking Peter and leaving! Do you understand?” Her expression’s ugly, a terrifying match for the sneer on his father’s face. Peter can’t seem to focus. He jerks randomly in his mother’s hold, her skin dry as vellum paper, one hand smoothing over his forehead. The car engine ticks quietly in the background. Steady as the metronome Peter used to keep beat on piano – tick, tick, tick – a pacemaker to his mother’s building rage. The jumper cable snakes from the engine block to the work table where….where… Peter’s eyes skitter away.__

He remembers Sam standing watch in the front garden as her parents underwent divorce. She kept one eye on her younger brother as he dug for worms in the short buffalo grass, with the other, she would talk to Peter in a low voice. The summer that year was an endless stretch of heat; her dog Bark would chase the sporadic cars down the street with casual disregard for limbs and tail. Sam would twist her bangle around her wrist compulsively, a narrow band of silver dented with repeated impact. All of her answers were monosyllabic until Peter stopped asking questions and dragged Sam to his place. They watched _Lethal Weapon _on beta-max, the first good cop/bad cop movie Peter ever saw and ate popcorn, their fingers slippery with melted butter. Sam listed to one side after forty minutes, and later, began to sob. Peter turned the volume to mask the sound, his hand between her shoulder blades, feeling the little hiccups of her rasping breath, and stared at the fingerprints Sam left behind. The trail of melted butter bright as a snail’s meandering path. “Why don’t you go to school?” Sam asked later, when she was composed and Riggs was racing through the desert, trying to save Murtaugh’s daughter.__

“I will,” Peter corrected. “Starting next term at high school.”

He’d been under the tutelage of Walter for as long as he can recall. Peter’s eleven and he’s familiar with the stigma of being different. Sam’s the only friend he’s managed to make. Curiously, he asks, “Will you still talk to me?” He’ll be younger than his fellow students when high school starts. Unlike most boys, Peter never underwent a ‘yuck, girl’s!’ stage; companionship outside of his parents was rare, not to be dismissed by gender. Would I be in your circle of friends? Peter wants to know. Sam’s not an artful crier: even after she’s ceased her face remains puffy, blotched with red and white dots, her nose bulbous. She’s long limbed and cute under normal circumstances, but she seems real here, flawed, leaking with human detritus, secreted away in Peter’s basement where her parents can’t find her. She’s mourning everything she’s losing and Peter understands that.

She studies him seriously. “No.”

It stings with all the cruelty of childhood.

He sucks the salt from his bottom lip, eyes half-lidded, and turns the volume back up. Sam twists on her knees and kisses Peter once, her tongue probing, her mouth a hard line. Peter’s heart rate explodes, stuttering more violently than the images on the screen. Sam tastes like salt, tears, her eyes closed firmly against the sight of him. Peter keeps his own wide open. He parts his mouth until the tentative touch of her tongue becomes firm, her hand knotting in his hair. It doesn’t feel like TV. He doesn’t feel smooth or particularly grown-up. It feels awkward, like he’s trying to swallow around a slug, digging out worms the same way her brother does. His stomach’s hollow; chest fluttering frantically. Sam’s breasts barely shape the front of her t-shirt, twin bumps, close enough he can feel the training bra under his hand. In the background, Riggs is repeatedly shocked as he’s tortured. They break apart. “Why not?” Peter whispers, confused.

“You’re fat,” Sam says, and turns around to watch Mel Gibson as he dangles from the overhead pipes.

He’s eleven when he first goes to public school, two years younger than his contemporaries and, until then, home schooled for his entire life. Sam doesn’t speak to him. She won’t look sideways at him. Samantha stands in the circle of hostile faces when Chris Cowan slams his fist into Peter’s face on day two, and the jaunts of the older kids turn into a crescendo as Peter’s knees hit the pavement, stunned. In turn, Peter’s expelled three days later when Cowen opens his locker and an ink-bomb explodes in his face. Peter’s younger, years away from his growth spurt and gormless among the teenagers who surround him. He’s smarter. One: Peter likes to fight, and two (like his father, his _real _father): he fights to damage.__

“He’s my son,” Walter explodes, “and you are my wife!”

Peter never thought of Walter as threatening - larger than life, a giant at the kitchen table, laughing, or making pancakes in the shape of whales, or teaching Peter about the constellations with a patience bordering on the infinite - but never harmful. Walter’s voice is like thunder as he stares Elizabeth down, there’s superiority and a _put-down _in his tone that makes the hairs on Peter’s neck stand upright. “Don’t be so blind-sided and dumb, Elizabeth.”__

“For god’s sake Walter! Look at what you are turning into!”

Peter can smell engine oil. Beneath that is an acidic stench that matches the stain on the front of his jeans. He tries to twist away, mortification giving way to fury. He’s twelve now. Peter can’t remember the last time his body betrayed him, and Riggs…Rigg’s _didn’t _when he was shocked, but there’s a far cry between reality and what Hollywood deems to show, all the grim details lost in the telling.__

“His tolerance level is sub-par!” Walter says. He says it like a scientist, as an adult observer who’s noticed a variance between two distinct samples, and notes the difference without forming bias.

Peter’s twelve. He doesn’t hear ‘there’s a difference.’ He hears ‘sub-par’ and knows he doesn’t measure up to his father’s expectations. He breaks loose, twists out of Elizabeth’s hold quick as an eel, and stumbles out of the garage, into the house and up the stairs. He strips his soiled clothing off and stares, wide-eyed, at the red marks that adorn his skin. In the bathroom mirror, Peter’s pale as a vampire, disembodied. He throws up in a shower where the water runs so hot it’s set to scorching and thinks violently _I hate you, I hate you, I hate you _… It feel like Walter’s changing before his eyes. Something malignant, spiteful, pushing beneath the surface of his father’s skin.__

He steps out of the shower carefully; skin pink from the heat, no longer patterned with the entry wounds of electricity, and wraps a towel around his waist. He leaves his clothes in a heap on the bathroom floor and walks to his bedroom. There’s a photo of Peter on the nightstand, taken when he was five, a soccer jersey on his shoulders, ball clamped under his armpit, his smile happy, full of baby-teeth. Peter stares at it listlessly. He doesn’t remember being that blonde. He rests his fingertip against the silver frame and pushes, watches the image of a smiling boy with blonde hair vanish into the trash, buried in a too shallow grave. _I hate you _, he thinks, hollowed out.__

Unlike Samantha, Peter’s parents never divorced. But Saint Claire’s was the next best thing.

 

3/. 2011 – The Ambulance.

 _(He’s got third degree burns over ninety per cent of his body – AltLiv) ___

“Man down! Med team to Grayshot bridge! Man down!”

It’s not Lincoln’s familiar voice over the radio. The first jolt of alarm rushes down Olivia’s spine, there’s a moment where she wavers, her shot was true, there’s a chance she’ll find the suspect in the woods if she follows now, but then, her shot was true, and when the perp seeks medical attention Fringe division will sweep.

Olivia holsters her weapon and jogs up the incline, dodging tree roots and overhanging branches. She smells it before she sees anything - burnt flesh – there’s not one but three bodies, the two at the epicentre disintegrated into mere ash. The third victim lies at the foot of Grayshot bridge, a cluster of agents in a rough semi-circle around him. Olivia scans their faces, searching for one in particular, and then scans them again more keenly. Her sprint slows to a jerky stalk as she approaches the group, her eyes fixed on the combat boots.

“Lincoln?” she says, looking for verification, because that’s not him.

The man on the ground is blackened, raw glimpses of red seen beneath the surface. There’s no hair, eyebrows, or eyelashes. His ears have dissolved with the heat still seeping from the ground, his nose reduced to cartridge and bone. His lips are gone, teeth bared in a rictus grin, and most horrifying of all, he _moves _, insensate, at the sound of his own name. Lincoln’s eyes partially open and Olivia swallows bile, drops to her knees beside him. “Hey there,” Olivia says, numbly, because she doesn’t know what else to say.__

Where’s the fucking ambulance, she thinks. There’s a moment of silence, one blessed moment where Lincoln doesn’t seem to be aware, and then he starts to scream.

The sound is shredded, inhuman. He must have gasped when he saw the fire coming toward him, an instinctive inhale; he’s seared down to his very lungs. He screams wetly, hands clawing at the pavement, until Olivia pins his hand down, knowing whatever hurt she’s causing won’t register amongst the conflagration of agony.

“Hold on, hold on.”

Nonsense words, curses, maybe a prayer or two because he needs to survive long enough to reach the burn unit. If the ambulance gets Lincoln there in time, the damage can be reversed. But his clothes are fused to his flesh, in some parts, melted clean away. Blindly, Olivia stares at a flash of cartoon anime, white boxers against charred skin, and realises it’s the underwear Lincoln was wearing beneath his uniform that morning, childish, disarming, and so very _him _. She sinks her teeth into her bottom lip.  
The scream ratchets up. In the background, the ambulance siren wails as it approaches.__

“Ma’am, get out of the way!”

A knee knocks into her ribs. Olivia stumbles from her crouch onto her ass and watches the paramedics as they deliver a sedative, as Lincoln finally falls silent, his scream breaking off so suddenly Olivia’s heart lurches. They have him bundled onto a stretcher, inside the ambulance in less than forty seconds. Olivia stands upright, walks a tight circle. “Kreisling, secure the scene, bag the bodies, and monitor any gun-shot wounds to surrounding hospitals. Contact Agent Francis and tell him to meet me at Burns Central. Immediately. Have your grunts do a sweep and search on the ground and give me the keys to your car.”

Kreisling tosses them wordlessly.

Olivia catches them left-handed, distracted, and bolts toward his car. Lincoln only needs to survive for ten minutes, until the medics get him to Central. Ten minutes wasn’t long, Lee spends longer than that doing his hair in the morning. She slides into the seat and tears off, following the path of the ambulance as it bulldozes through the traffic. She can’t fathom a death more painful than being burnt alive; she can’t fathom someone who would intentionally _do _that to another human being. There’s a ringing in Olivia’s ear, wet, painful as nails down a blackboard, and she stares at her right hand where flakes of Lincoln’s flesh have stuck to her palm.__

Lincoln survives his ten minutes. She stands in the lobby until Charlie pulls her into a hug – come here, kiddo – and feels herself shake against him, listens to his heart-rate, until the steady drum supplants the ringing scream in her ear. “I want to go after them,” she says, evenly. So very cold.

“I know.”


End file.
